Almost 9 months into freelancing and I'm finding that the number of prospective clients is becoming a relatively steady flow. 🎉

Though some of my clients I have never actually spoken to (even during the "introduction") the majority I have always had an initial chat with. This is usually a 30 minutes call on Hangouts.

However, this amazing situation brings a lot more of this:

> “me - Can you do this time
> them - no, can you do this time
> me - no, can you do this time
> ...”— old meWithout being able to see the other persons calendar, the only option is to choose a random time that I can do. This can lead the scenario above which is a waste of time and if you're both stretched across multiple timezones it can take a while to come to a conclusion.

Solution

The other day I found a service called Calendly. The TLDR; Calendly gives you a link that you can share with the client. This link shows them all your available times in their time zone. All the client has to do is select which slot they want!

This then adds a calendar event. If you use Google Calendar, it can be setup to contain a Hangouts link, though Calendly does integrate with GoToMeeting.

Though my favourite feature is that you can limit the number of events per a day. I limit this to 1 so that my productivity isn't destroyed by lots of calls.